Huawei

I was asked to participate in the Huawei Mate 10 battery challenge. After relentlessly complaining to my friends at Huawei about the pathetic battery life (among other things) of my iPhone 7 they agreed to lend me a Mate 10 to play with if I’d pick a 24 hour period of time and record my battery usage.

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about smartphone batteries:

When you get a new device it’s very important to fully charge it before the first use. When using the smartphone for the first time you’ll want to use it until the battery is completely drained without plugging it into anything. Repeating this process one more time creates a smartphone battery that’s been trained to deliver its full potential.

The Huawei Mate 10 is impressive.

Most days I switch between the Mate and the iPhone 7. Before that, I was carrying my P9 tethered to my iPhone. I’m still a little hooked into the ios ecosystem but the only device more disappointing (and expensive!) than the iPhone 7 has been my husband’s iPhone X. I’m slowly making my way to full-time Android. Until them tethering the iPhone to the Mate 10 is a great solution. Just weeks ago it was the reverse. I’ll likely always want both Android and iOS because my FOMO is extreme and because my office consists of two phones, a laptop, and a completely neglected home office space.

In any event, the folks at Huawei were making an infographic for the Mate 10 battery challenge. When Huawei sent a mock-up including my headshot it was cropped oddly. By me… oops. So they asked me for a new headshot and when I didn’t respond right away they asked about using one of my facebook photos. Which, although serviceable, was three hair colors ago. They asked for a second and I told them I’d provide a new photo over the weekend.

I set up a tripod and put the iPhone on selfie mode. Let’s face it, I’ll be 48 this month and there’s much to be said for a kind of crummy selfie camera. We don’t need to pick up every detail. Except, that it was just a selfie. The three-second delay is helpful but I couldn’t get a good photo, and with every bad photo I was crankier.

I switched to the Mate 10 and skipped the selfie mode. I put the Huawei phone on the tripod and clicked through to the smile menu. You see, you can set the Mate 10 to automatically take a photo when it sees a smile. I just sat in my room alone. It was just me, my tripod, and a cat (who was likely judging me), smiling at the camera and taking dozens of photos in about three minutes. It was painless. Even though I’m able to turn a selfie into an existenial crisis I think the photos came out pretty good.

Well, most of them…. I’m really about words not selfies for a reason.

You can check social media for the hashtag #Mate10BatteryChallenge and see what people are experiencing around the world.

I found that I used the phone (funny to call it that because I hardly ever use it to actually speak) for 25 hours, received more than 400 notifications, sent or received in excess of 700 emails, streamed NPR all day long, messed around on social media, still had 27% of my battery life to play with.